YAY! Totally professional liner guy (lets call him Roscoe) came out and made the job look so easy i was embarassed. Paid less than I expected to as well (home maintenance on long island can be so ridiculously pricy).
As a refresher, here is the worst of the Liner issues i was I was dealing with taken after only a couple days of opening:
It turns out that it was not only the liner, but the wood coping that goes atop the steel walls of the pool had split at the end next to the steps, so that was also pulling away and made it look even worse than I thought.
First Roscoe put a couple screws in to attach the split end of the wood back in place. Then he went to work with a heat gun. No special design, one that was made for blistering and scraping paint (Wagner brand). He heated the liner from the water line up, but not going all way to the lip of the liner, checking periodically for the stretchiness of the liner. When the vinyl became pliable so that it would pull (being careful not to melt the vinyl) roscoe worked the liner up slowly starting on the right side working to the left, using a flat-head screwdriver to tuck the top of the liner back into its track along the top of the coping as he went. he did this process a couple inches at a time...
He put in a couple of pieces of liner lock, strategically placed, not the whole length. This corner didn't take him very long, maybe 15 minutes, here is a shot when he was near the end...
He did that corner plus three others that were pulling away but didnt look as bad, NOW the pool looks great! (except for the obvious rust stains
)
Now that I have seen it in action, I could totally do that myself if needed in future years. He didn't need the water level lowered (I have about 4-5 inches normally exposed, (thats what she said!)) but it is easy to see how this could help prevent over-stretching in localized spots.The caution is OBVIOUSLY that you are working with a high amperage electrical device right next to the water, so don't do it with others in the pool (doy!), don't touch the device to the water (double doy!) and if you happen to drop it in the pool unplug it prior to trying to retrieve it (super-sloppy-double-doy-oy!).
I know you can heat the vinyl with boiling water instead of the gun, but that actually seems more dangerous to handle, and it isn't logistically easy to boil that much water and keep it hot for 15 minutes while you are strategically applying it to the liner. Maybe a steam gun would be the most secure approach to heat the liner, assuming that such devices exist and that the steam they produce is actually near boiling temp.
No more makeshift water shields hanging over the pools edge for me! The rust stains are the last mountain to climb, that can wait for the end of the season.
The chiluns are my primary concern after all. The CC has been non-detectable (or well below the 0.2 ppm limit of the FASDPD test kit). I have been using that as an indication of some invisible germ outbreaks, so there isn't likely anything too nasty. But I am upping the "normal" chlorine now, given the info in that chart.
